Tinubu’s Invisible Beneficiaries of Cash Transfers 

Weneso Orogun 

The Auditor-General of the Federation has dropped another accountability bombshell on Nigeria’s much-advertised cash-transfer programme. But the most disturbing revelation is not merely that N33.75 billion was transferred to more than 3.29 million households. It is that when auditors asked the most elementary question in public finance — who actually received the money? — the government could not produce the records required to answer it.

  The finding is contained in the  Auditor-General’s 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance/Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies. PUNCH reported that the audit examined transactions of the National Cash Transfer Office for 2023 and found electronic transfers totalling N33.751 billion to 3,295,207 households and beneficiaries across 35 states. Yet the payment vouchers did not contain complete beneficiary details, while the Remita statement required to reconcile actual recipients with the National Social Register and National Beneficiary Register was not produced.

More troubling still, the Auditor-General reported that attempts to obtain the Remita records were “obstructed and denied” by accounts staff of the National Cash Transfer Office. The consequence was that the payments could not be properly authenticated and the auditors could not establish whether the beneficiaries were genuine.

This is where my expression “invisible beneficiaries” ceases to be merely a newspaper headline. If government cannot identify the people who received billions of naira supposedly meant for Nigeria’s poorest citizens, Nigerians are entitled to ask: who are these beneficiaries?

To be fair, an audit query is not a criminal conviction. The Auditor-General did not declare that the entire N33.75 billion was stolen. The finding is more precise: the government failed to provide the documentary evidence necessary for an independent audit to establish that the money reached legitimate beneficiaries.

This is, nevertheless, a devastating indictment of financial control.

Nor is this an isolated finding. The same audit identified N36.744 billion in payments made without the required pre-payment audit; N4.616 billion in payments for which relevant vouchers were not produced; N350.18 million in state-level enrolment funds without adequate supporting documentation; N393.71 million in refunds without evidence that the money was credited to the Consolidated Revenue Fund; and N280.42 million paid to service providers without the required Advance Payment Guarantee.

  The wider audit report is even more sobering. Across federal ministries, departments and agencies, the Auditor-General identified financial irregularities and control weaknesses exceeding N1.34 trillion.

The political temptation will be to describe this as a Tinubu scandal. That would be too simplistic.

The transactions questioned by the audit relate to 2023, when President Bola Tinubu inherited the National Social Investment Programme architecture from the Buhari administration. The more uncomfortable conclusion is therefore broader: the APC has had years to construct a credible mechanism for transferring public money to poor Nigerians, yet the accountability problem appears to have travelled from Buhari to Tinubu.

The evidence of failure predates Tinubu.

In May 2019, Aisha Buhari publicly declared that her husband’s N500 billion Social Investment Programme had failed “woefully”, particularly in northern Nigeria.

Four years later, the National Economic Council, under Vice-President Kashim Shettima, effectively delivered another verdict on the Buhari-era system. It resolved to abandon the National Social Register used for conditional cash transfers because the register was considered lacking in credibility.

One would therefore have expected the Tinubu administration to regard the rebuilding of the social-protection system as an urgent institutional reform, rather than simply another occasion for announcing impressive numbers.

Instead, the numbers themselves have become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

In February 2024, Finance Minister Wale Edun offered Nigerians an important assurance about the redesigned electronic payment system: “It will be clear who it went to and when it went to them.”

That is precisely the standard Nigerians should demand.

But the Auditor-General’s findings raise the uncomfortable question of whether that promise has been fulfilled with the necessary institutional discipline.

 There is nothing inherently wrong with cash transfers. Properly designed and transparently administered, they can be an effective instrument of social protection. In an economy suffering from high food prices, declining purchasing power and widespread vulnerability, putting money directly into the hands of genuinely poor households can be both humane and economically rational.

The problem is cash transfers without credible identification, verification, reconciliation and disclosure.

A government cannot credibly claim that millions of poor Nigerians have been rescued from economic hardship and, at the same time, tell auditors that it cannot produce the records establishing precisely who received the money.

 The World Bank supplied another uncomfortable dimension in 2025 when it reported that only about 37 per cent of targeted households had benefited from the conditional cash-transfer programme.

There is now an additional problem of official arithmetic.

In July 2026, the Presidency announced that the expanded programme had reached 15 million vulnerable households. Yet in August, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs reportedly referred to “slightly over 10 million households”. Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar has consequently demanded an explanation for the apparent five-million-household discrepancy.

The government should welcome such questions rather than treat them as politically motivated attacks.

There is a straightforward way to settle the controversy: publish the evidence.

Let Nigerians know the number of beneficiaries by state and local government; the amount paid to each household; the dates of payment; the payment channels; and the identity-verification mechanisms employed. Let the Auditor-General, the National Assembly and independent auditors reconcile the payment records against the beneficiary registers.

This is not an unreasonable demand. It is the minimum standard of accountability for a programme funded with public money.

Indeed, the government should go further. It should establish a publicly auditable digital trail through which an authorised auditor can trace every payment from the Treasury to a verifiable beneficiary without compromising the privacy of vulnerable citizens.

The poor Nigerians for whom these programmes are supposedly designed deserve nothing less.

There is also a larger economic issue here. Social transfers are not merely acts of political benevolence. They are fiscal interventions. Every naira transferred represents a choice about the allocation of scarce public resources. If the intended beneficiary cannot be identified, government cannot credibly measure whether the intervention reduced poverty, supported consumption or stimulated local economic activity.

Without reliable data, therefore, the programme cannot be properly evaluated economically either.

Nigeria does not need another impressive headline announcing that billions of naira have been distributed to millions of beneficiaries whose identities cannot be reconciled with the payment records.

It needs a social-protection system in which every naira is traceable, every beneficiary is verifiable and every claim of success is measurable. The fundamental question is therefore no longer simply:

How much money did APC governments transfer?

It is:

Who actually received it?

Until that question can be answered with documentary evidence, Nigeria’s cash-transfer programme will remain less a triumph of social protection than an unfinished audit of public trust.

• Orogun is a former Editor-at-Large at THISDAY